Promoting Scottish literatures globally
We are a worldwide academic organisation dedicated to cultivating the study of Scottish languages, literatures and cultures across the globe.
The Board of Trustees
The Board of Trustees administer the charitable status of IASSL, registered as a Scottish charity no SC044410. The Trustees hold IASSL funds and make decisions on the allocation of IASSL reserves at the request of the IASSL Executive. They are also all committed to supporting IASSL’s goals internationally and act as champions and ambassadors for the aims of the Association.
Murray Pittock MAE FRSE is Chair of the Board of Trustees and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow. In 2010, he launched the Scottish Studies Global research theme at Glasgow. That year, a conversation in a pub in Maynooth with Ian Brown and Gerry Carruthers led to the idea of IASSL and Murray convened and supported the first Congress at Glasgow in 2014, becoming founding Convenor of the Association from 2014-17. In 2020, he was elected to Academia Europaea (the European Academy) for his research on Scottish Studies in a Global Context, the first election to the Academy for research on Scottish history or literature. He is currently general editor of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay (funded by a £1M award from UK Research and Innovation) and has recently published Scotland: The Global History with Yale University Press.
Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on eighteenth-century Scots vernacular poetry and the press, and is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment. She is currently involved in two major AHRC-funded textual editing projects: ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’, in which she is editor of Ramsay’s poems and co-editor of his prose, and ‘Editing Robert Burns for the Twenty-First Century: Poetry and Correspondence’, where she is co-editor of Burns’s letters. Rhona was Secretary of the first World Congress of Scottish Literatures in 2014 and first Secretary of IASSL, 2014-17.
Gerry Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Robert Burns and his current projects also include ongoing editing of The Blackwell-Wiley Companion to Scottish Literature and The Blackwell-Wiley Encyclopaedia of Scottish Literature. He is Secretary of the Board for Ellisland Museum Trust (Burns's home in Dumfriesshire) and a member of the Joint-Advisory Committee for Walter Scott's library and home at Abbotsford.
Pauline Mackay, Treasurer of the Association, is an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees.